owing to the low wages paid to railway men. This and the other reasons just given combined to render the progress in England extremely slow. Some of the First Installations Nevertheless, in 1902 the British Pneumatic Railway Signal Company, who had in the previous year installed its first low pressure pneumatic interlocking at Grateley, on the London and South Western Railway, brought into use between that station and Andover an automatic block system controlled by continuous track circuits, the distance being about six miles. The signals were worked by low pressure air. The success of these systems led to the adoption of them shortly afterwards on the widened four-track main line between Woking and Basingstoke on the South Western, a distance of 24 miles. The Grateley-Andover installation has now been removed, not because it was at all unsatisfactory, but because it was felt traffic and other circumstances did not warrant its further employment. In 1905, Hall electro-gas automatic signals were brought into use on the North Eastern main line between Alne and Thirsk, a distance of 11 miles. In 1907, semi-automatic signals were installed between Pangbourne and Goring, a distance of 2-3/4 miles, four track, by the Great Western Railway to divide up a long manual block section and a few similar installations have been made on the Midland, the Great Central, the Belfast and County Down and other roads. By this year, track circuiting had begun to be extensively used in England. The British Pneumatic Signal Company had installed a series of low-pressure plants near Manchester on the Great Central and track circuits were used throughout while the same thing had been done at Clapham Junction on the South Western. The Westinghouse Company had supplied the District Railway, London, with automatic signals and were actively engaged in fitting similar apparatus to the tube lines; they soon afterwards commenced work on the Metropolitan Railway. The main steam lines began to apply track circuits at various places in conjunction with ordinary manual signaling and this process received an added impetus from the terrible disaster which befell the Midland Company's Scotch Express near a station called Hawes Junction, when, in emerging from a tunnel it crashed into two light engines that had been forgotten and had entered the block under the signals set for the express. Several other bad accidents, notably one at Pontypridd, on the Taff Vale Railway, due to trains and engines being overlooked by signalmen while standing at adverse signals, emphasized the necessity for paying serious attention to the question of track circuiting and for undertaking a really earnest study of the matter to see whether the difficulties due to the light freight car, etc., could not be overcome or at least considerably minimized.